Faster growing teams need more ops staff

Faster growing orgs need more staff in order to deliver the same service.

To see why, let's consider two orgs, each with 100 people but one is growing at 25% and another at 50%.

The headline

    Dials

    The two orgs
    Managers

    On the manager:IC ratio. The dial is IC staff per manager, not direct reports per manager — in any real org chart most senior managers are managing other managers, not individual contributors, so counting direct reports badly understates how much of the org sits in the management layer.

    System re-design work

    Some operations work is delivering, some is system re-design.

    (There are factors outside org scale which contribute to system re-design priority, so the factor here is overstated.)

    More staff are new

    New staff:

    1. Take senior capacity to hire and onboard
    2. Are lower capacity than well spun up staff

    Share of staff by tenure band

    Share of staff by tenure band, two growth rates

    Managers are new too

    How the model works

    Steady state. Growth compounds annually; leavers depart at a constant hazard. The share of staff with tenure under T years settles at 1 − e−(g+s)T, where g and s are the continuous-time equivalents of the annual growth and turnover rates. Every figure on this page is a consequence of that one expression plus the dials above. Made-up numbers to flesh out a point, not a forecast.